National Archives Catalog API

excluded Executive · Tier 3 · API · National Archives and Records Administration

What this source is

NARA's Catalog API v2 (catalog.archives.gov/api/v2) serves the nation's archival records, including DoD imagery transferred for preservation — an archive of record, not a publication stream.

Identity and registry record

Registry id
nara-catalog
Agency / parent organization
National Archives and Records Administration
Branch
executive
Type
API
Status
evaluated-excluded
Tier
3
URL (home)
https://catalog.archives.gov/api/v2/api-docs/ (opens in a new tab)
Registered
2026-07-28
Registry notes
Evaluated 2026-07-28 in the multi-modal survey: documented API (key by email to [address withheld], 10,000 queries/month default) but archival by nature — nothing it publishes constitutes a new government action on a given day. Revisit only for deliberate historical-context or backfill features.

How we ingest it

Channel
API
Method
Not applicable to the daily flow — archive, not news-flow.
Request budget
the agency class: at most 1,500 requests per day shared across every agency web source, counted from the fetch log (failed requests count too)
Politeness
robots.txt is honored as observed — including each host's crawl-delay, exactly — and every request identifies itself as fapd/0.1 (Free Agentic Publication Digester; +https://fapd.info/bot.html; contact: hustleyourcity@gmail.com); a refusal is recorded, never evaded
Capture and hash
captured raw content is hashed (SHA-256) into the day's committed provenance manifest, hash-chained day to day (PROVENANCE.md)

Ingestion health

Not ingested: the registry status of this source is evaluated-excluded.

Ingestion statistics

These figures describe this project's ingestion of this source — items we recorded and requests we made — and nothing else. They are not a measurement of the publisher.

Not ingested: the registry status of this source is evaluated-excluded. Ingestion statistics are measured for active sources only.

All time

No requests to catalog.archives.gov are recorded in the request log.

Last 30 days, day by day

No requests and no items were recorded in the last 30 days, so there is nothing to chart.